As I write this it is March 24th, 2019, and I still haven’t gotten around to writing the recap for session 108 of On a Red World Alone. I legitimately do not recall when we played session 108. My best guess is Wednesday September 26th, 2018. Two days shy of six months. I’ve been running ORWA for over three years now, and I’ve never fallen so far behind on recaps. I know it’s probably not interesting to anyone else, but for my own edification I’d like to put some note here as to what happened, and how things are going to change because of it.
Part of the issue is the cycle of my day job. Every fall I get so busy and overworked that all I can do is eat, sleep, and work. I do my best to ensure ORWA still happens every week, but usually wind up cancelling about a third of the sessions, and always fall behind on recaps. When the busy season is over, I got back and fill in the gaps. This year I just kept on being busy. I never had time to fill in the gaps, and the longer that went on the more of a gap needed to be filled, and the more daunting the project became.
The end of g+ is also a factor here. The ORWA community on that site has always been the primary repository for these recaps. It’s where they were most useful to me, since I could search the community for anything I half-remembered, and it’d usually bring up the relevant recap without any trouble. The recaps on P&P were meant as a public facing backup, and just aren’t as convenient a tool for referencing during the game. Knowing anything I put on g+ was not long for this world was a big blow to my motivation to catch up.
It’s not all circumstantial, though. The biggest issue with the recaps is their sheer size. I like having these thoroughly detailed documents recording years worth of D&D play, but they flat out take too long to write. The bloated format is a bad habit I’ve clung to for years. I knew it wasn’t sustainable, and now I’ve hit my breaking point.
The good news is that I have handwritten notes for every session of ORWA. I can fill in all six months of games I failed to keep up with. The recaps will be a little sparse because my handwritten notes were not intended to completely replace my memories, and I don’t have much memory of D&D games I played half a year ago, but they will exist.
More recent recaps will be better, but I’m going to aim to keep them brutally short to prevent myself from falling behind like this again, and to give myself more time to prep. They’ll focus more on terse descriptions of highlights rather than exhaustive step-by-step retellings of the whole session.